Until then, though, I needed to get (a) a grip and (b) back in the moment. Especially because Oliver and I were going out this evening on a proper grown-up, we-are-in-a-relationship date. We were doing—and it was kind of hard to say this with a straight face—dinner and a show. He’d booked us a table at this place called Stem & Glory, which was apparently one of the best vegan restaurants in London, and I was slowly coming to the conclusion that the best vegan restaurants in the city really were nicer places to eat than an average restaurant that would just serve me a piece of dead cow. Then afterwards…well, that had been complicated. Oliver had wanted to see Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic, but I’d told him that if I was going to a vegan restaurant for him, he had to go to Pretty Woman: The Musical for me. And honestly, I was kind of psyched about it.

Well, psyched-ish. It had been quite a long day all told because the photocopier had jammed and then Alex had insisted on trying to fix it and got his hand stuck somewhere inside, and Barbara Clench had refused to let me get an engineer to come and extract him because she was concerned that if he was seen interfering with the machine, it would invalidate the warranty. Not that there was much chance of our keeping the incident secret anyway, since Rhys Jones Bowen had been livestreaming the whole time and soliciting possible solutions from his ever-growing army of followers. Or Rhystocrats as they’d apparently taken to calling themselves.

Anyway, I was just leaving when my phone rang. It was Bridget’s number, but that was the only clue I had that it was actually her because for a long time she had trouble getting words out. Which was the first sign that something was seriously wrong. Because sure, Bridge lived from disaster to disaster, but she dealt with that by loudly declaring how ruined everything was while at the same time calmly fixing the actual problem. It was a slightly peculiar process but seemed to work for her. When she got quiet, though, that meant she was genuinely stuck and was falling back on my preferred strategy: pretending the problem didn’t exist in the hope that it would go away.

“Bridge?” I asked into the silence. “Bridge, what’s going on?”

“It’s…” The voice was her, but she sounded choked up. “It’s Tom.”

Shit. There were two ways this could go, and neither was good. “Is he okay?”

“Probably.” That was her angry voice. So this was a Tom’s-done-something call, not a something’s-happened-to-Tom call. I wasn’t sure which was worse.